November 02, 2010

Habeas Corpus - Relist Revisited

The Volokh Conspiracy has a new post up about the Supreme Court relists. My previous discussion of the relists is here. A couple new cases were added to the relist list, but no new habeas cases.

Apart from Smith, no action was taken on the other three relists. The only news is that the Court ordered the lower court record in Lawhorn.

One of the commenters to the post asked about Maples. I tried to submit a comment but it didn't go through. So I'll just talk about it here.

Preliminarily, let me say that my initial take on Maples was off. Based on the Washington Post editorial, I got the sense that the issue in the case had to do with an untimeliness issue as to the petition in federal court. The editorial asked the Supreme Court to use the same standards for missing a deadline that the Court used in a takings case. That led me to believe that the issue had to do with the application of a time limit that the Court had control over.

But that's not the case at all. I have now dug into the 11th Circuit's decision in Maples (something I should have done before -- teaches me to rely on a newspaper editorial). Maples has to do with a procedural default in state court. Maples did not timely file a notice of appeal from a trial court post-conviction decision. As a result, he did not fully exhaust the issue. So the question in that case is whether the procedural default was independent and adequate. The Supreme Court would have absolutely no power in Maples to say to the Alabama state courts that they should apply their rules differently than the way that they did in this case. Outside of my other complaints about the editorial, it made a completely irrelevant argument. Makes me kind of really annoyed.

The true question is whether Alabama had been consistently applying the procedural rule in the manner that they did in Maples' case.

When framed like that, I now have a pretty good guess as to what's happening with Maples. It is most likely being held pending the Court's decision in Walker v. Martin (see the Pending Supreme Court Cases page). The issues in that case are:

Whether a state procedural bar that prevents collateral relief for a “substantially delayed” filing represents an “independent and inadequate state law ground" because (1) the rule is vague, and (2) the courts did not “consistently” apply the rule

That would explain the lack of a relist and no request for the lower court record.